OpenView invests US$25m in ANZ workforce management company

Deputy has received US$25M in Series A financing from OpenView, the company's first from an institutional investor in its eight year history.

The funding will be used to rapidly grow Deputy's team across offices around the globe, including Sydney.

As well as the funding, Daniel Demmer, a managing partner at OpenView and former president of Endeca, will also join the board at Deputy.

"Our investment in Deputy marks the largest single investment OpenView has made in our decade-plus history," says Demmer.

"Co-founders Steve Shelley and Ashik Ahmed and the Deputy team have built a truly extraordinary platform that automates a broken and manual workflow for hundreds of thousands of users around the world," he explains.

"We're looking forward to working with the team and realizing Deputy's further growth potential in the coming years.

The company now counts 28,000 businesses as customers including Amazon, Qantas, Nike and NASA and gives users the ability to auto-optimise schedules by role, hours worked and more.

Deputy aims to give a modern mobile and cloud-first answer to out-dated scheduling systems.

"Workers have been left frustrated with countless hours wasted and less-than-optimal work schedules created by legacy tools," explains Shelley.

"Shift workers comprise close to 60 per cent of the world's labour force, yet the technology to serve these workers and their employers is unsuited to such a large and complicated task," he says.

"For the last eight years, we have grown our company from an idea to a full-fledged business. Now with the support of OpenView, a firm that wholly shares our mission of improving people's working lives, we will be able to accelerate the product roadmap, new products and supercharge the go to market plan.